The $4B Man: How to win BIG in business

- August 13, 2025 (7 months ago) • 01:37:46

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	If I told you that a kid flunked out of first grade, I don't think the first thing you would say is, "That's a future billionaire."
00:05	Hayes Barnard	"But you probably would have joined the crowd of people that made fun of me for being dumb."
00:12	Shaan Puri	Today, he's known as the guy you see on the cover of Forbes — a tech entrepreneur, a billionaire "sun god" because of all the work he's done in the solar industry. But the crazy thing about Hayes is that his story is very much a "started from the bottom" story.
00:23	Hayes Barnard	A lot of great leaders—those who are Level Five leaders—have "daddy issues," learning disabilities, or a near-death experience.
00:30	Shaan Puri	Haze pretty much never does podcasts. I pulled the friend card and asked him to do this because I think he's got a story worth telling that I've never told. </FormattedResponse>
00:35	Hayes Barnard	That one before—definitely on camera, but...
00:39	Shaan Puri	You're in the eye of the storm, right? Like the '08 [2008] subprime mortgage crisis — you're in the mortgage business.
00:44	Hayes Barnard	"I would literally throw up in my driveway before I could go see my family every night."
00:48	Shaan Puri	You said, "The difference between rejection results is just how long you stick with it."
00:52	Hayes Barnard	A lot of people quit when it gets hard. Sometimes you don't even know you're quitting — you just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit.
01:00	Shaan Puri	"What was it like meeting Elon the first time?"
01:05	Hayes Barnard	Well, when I met Elon for the first time...
01:13	Shaan Puri	I think what's interesting about your story — because I have all the research here — and if I just zoom out and think about it, I think: how does a guy who flunked out of first grade end up... one of
01:23	Hayes Barnard	The Miss Macy's class. Oh.
01:24	Shaan Puri	Yeah—shout out to Miss Macy. How does someone like that end up where you are today? You're super successful; you've built a $10 billion company. You're doing what a lot of entrepreneurs want to do. If I think about how I got into entrepreneurship, what would have been the win? The win would have been: I'm having fun, I'm building a company that matters, I'm having success, and I'm doing it with talented people. One of your co‑founders is a fourth‑grade friend, so that's winning to me—and you've done that. So I think what's exciting to me is to hear how you approached this: how you went from the guy who could flunk out of first grade to make that happen. If I had met you when you were a kid—maybe 12, 13, 14 years old—would you have called yourself ambitious then? Were you really smart?
02:08	Hayes Barnard	Oh, if you had met me in grade school, you probably would have joined the crowd — a lot of people made fun of me for, you know, being dumb. I would go to this room called the resource room. The resource room was for kids who couldn't read. I would write all my letters backwards, and they would give me a "Dick and Jane" book to read in third grade. I would struggle through it. It was soul-crushing. I have dysgraphia, a form of dyslexia, and no one knew what it was in those days. People just thought you were stupid. They thought you couldn't read and you couldn't keep up, which is why I flunked first grade. It's not fun to flunk first grade when all your friends move on to second grade and make fun of you every year — basically for twelve years — because you're "the kid who flunked first grade." We were all friends in first grade, and then I didn't go with the rest of the kids. I had a lot of self-confidence issues. I had many questions about whether or not I was even going to be able to provide for myself at that moment in time. I overcompensated with sports. I tried to be a dynamic person. I don't know that I always overcompensated in the best ways, but a couple of teachers took me under their wing. There was this one guy, Ron Edwards — he was the gym teacher. He was an amazing guy. I didn't have a father; I was raised by a single mom, and he kind of stepped in. He knew I loved football and would say, "Look, Hayes, do you want to go?" At the time the St. Louis Cardinals were there. Their quarterback was Jim Hart and their running back was O.J. Anderson. That was my outlet — I was a fast runner, because I wasn't good at school.
03:59	Shaan Puri	Gotta be good at something.
04:00	Hayes Barnard	My man, I gotta—I need something. I needed something that I could anchor on, something that showed I might be good at something. The only thing I was good at was the 40‑yard dash. But he would take me to these banquets where I had the opportunity to meet Jim Hart or O.J. Anderson. It was just kind of a lens for, "Oh, okay—these guys, maybe there's a way out." </FormattedResponse>
04:21	Shaan Puri	And so now, if you meet somebody who—maybe a kid who's dyslexic or has a learning disability like that—what's the perspective you have now, with the benefit of hindsight, about those same kind of, like, "quote-unquote" limitations?
04:35	Hayes Barnard	Well, it's interesting. When you sit down with people who have achieved extraordinary outcomes, Jim Collins wrote a book about this called Good to Great. He talked about Level Five leaders. I had an opportunity to have lunch with Jim Collins at Stanford. It had to be fifteen years ago, and this was an unlock for me. He goes, "Hey, you're a Level Five leader. You're operating on this frequency that allows you to create these businesses and do these things." I'm like...
05:01	Shaan Puri	"How—what is a Level Five leader? What's the...?"
05:03	Hayes Barnard	Well, oftentimes with a level-five leader they have a great deal of compassion and empathy for people. They’ll often give up to go up. They have the ability to empower people instead of micromanaging them, recruit top talent, and put them in places that allow those organizations to scale. The reason for this, if you dig a couple of layers deeper, is oftentimes they have a learning disability. Many times they're on the spectrum. People who have Asperger's, or who are on the spectrum, when they're in school get made fun of a lot. This turns into this big trauma—where all your friends make fun of you, you don't have a lot of friends, and you're an outcast as a young person. That wants you to do things later in life to gain affirmation and get respect, especially if you're a male and you want male affirmation. The second component that you’ll often see is daddy issues. A lot of great leaders—level-five leaders—have pretty severe daddy issues. They had a major falling out with their father. Maybe it's a situation like me, where my father left when I was 2, so I don't really remember meeting my dad. I didn't meet him until I was, I think, around 30 years old. So when you dig into some of these level-five leaders you go, "Oh, there it is." He's looking for male affirmation; he's looking for respect. That's why he grinds and does the 100-hour weeks.
06:31	Shaan Puri	Right.
06:32	Hayes Barnard	To gain that affirmation. The third one, oftentimes, is a near-death experience or a career-ending injury in sports, or something along those lines. That will force the individual to make a greater sacrifice. It will also force them not to quit in the face of a pretty significant amount of adversity, which, unfortunately, a lot of founders and leaders do.
06:57	Shaan Puri	You said a phrase in there. You said, "They... they get—what did you say? They give up to get up." What did you say?
07:02	Hayes Barnard	"You gotta, you gotta give up to go up."
07:03	Shaan Puri	"Give up to go."
07:04	Hayes Barnard	So when you're really bright—let's say you’re the person who gets a 35 out of 36 on the ACT or a 1550 on the SAT—you're an achiever. You get to brag about it at cocktail parties and you realize, "I'm the smartest guy in the class." By the way, my two business partners, Jason Walker and Matt Dawson, were the smartest guys in the class. They had all the tassels when we graduated from high school... all the tassels when we graduated from college. I wasn't stupid—I'm like, "Hey, I want you guys on my side." There are lots of other people in my life who were the "smartest person in the class." Oftentimes it's not ego; it's that they're just very competent. They get frustrated quickly with other people when it takes them longer to learn things. So what do they do? They say, "Forget it, I'll just do it on my own." Right? "I'll do it more efficiently. I can do it faster. Why would I take an hour to train this individual when I can do it myself in fifteen minutes?" Well, the problem is they keep doing that same task over and over for fifteen minutes and they never give up control. They end up becoming a control freak and then wonder why their business isn't going to scale—because they have to be involved in everything all the time. If you have dyslexia, as an example, you learn to surround yourself with really smart people. They can do things you can't. Someone might say, "Oh wow, you're amazing at bond math. You're like the best math mind I've ever met in my entire life. I'd like to start a company with you—you're brilliant." So you start to surround yourself with all these really talented, amazing, extraordinary minds who are good at different things. Instead of trying to do it on your own, you're celebrating the talent around you.
08:45	Shaan Puri	Right. Have you ever heard what Ari Emanuel says about this? So, Ari runs CAA—now Endeavor. He—I think—was dyslexic. Somebody asked him, "How do you read contracts? Your whole business is contracts. Basically, you're a talent agent; every day is contracts." He said, "I sit in a room with people who are amazing at contracts." He explained, "Because I couldn't... I literally could not focus enough to get through it, so I just built a machine of people. Who can I bring in that will bring that to the table?" "And the same thing: I respect them, I value them, I need them, and they know that. Because of that, I'm able to have my zone of genius; they're able to have theirs, and we built a great team from that." You worked with and for Larry Ellison and with Elon, both of whom I would say are kind of legends in Silicon Valley and longtime leaders of companies. What was their style? Is it similar to what you said? Do they have their own play style that's totally different? And give me a sense—how close proximity were you?
09:48	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, I was probably like six levels away from Larry Ellison because I literally was a kid in a cubicle. I was a good bother of database administrators. I would basically have my headset on; I would call people — I would bother them to buy Oracle 7.0. They were like, "Oh man, you're so good at bothering people; we're going to let you manage 12 other people and teach them how to... bother." "Hey, can you teach the other 12 people how to bother people and sell Oracle 8.0?" I was like, "Yeah, no problem at all." Then they're like, "Wow, you know, we're thinking about not selling one or two products but like 300 products." By the end of it, I was there about eight years. I was fortunate: I was a global account manager; I could sell the whole suite of products and different things. What I learned the most was, one, what phenomenal products do — the fact that you could sell software for $8,090,000,000 and all you shipped was a CD blew my mind. I just couldn't believe this whole concept of software and the talent of people that could come together to deploy those assets at that stage. The information age was the biggest wealth creator at the time. When I was there, it was between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison on who was the wealthiest individual in the world. I was super inspired by Larry Ellison and very inspired by the collective talent that they recruited and surrounded you with.
11:11	Shaan Puri	What's his superpower, right? You said, at the time, maybe one of the wealthiest people in the world.
11:15	Hayes Barnard	Vision—he could pivot. I mean, obviously we started as a database company. There were a handful of other database companies at the time: Sybase, Informix, SQL Server with Microsoft. Then some of those started to drop off, or we acquired them. The superpower was his ability to have big, bold vision and ideas and to say, "Nope—now we're going to be an applications company. Now we're going to be a middleware company. Now we're going to acquire some of the hardware providers. Now we're going to become a software-as-a-service company (SaaS)." Being able to persuade an organization of that size at the time to shift those gears was remarkable. It was such an aspirational, inspirational place to work, with such urgency. No matter how much we grew, there was always the urgency to close out a quarter or close out a year. You just saw the grind factor and the "give-a-shit" factor from a group of people—it was next level.
12:13	Shaan Puri	Right.
12:14	Hayes Barnard	And so I learned — I learned how to grind. I learned, yeah: this is why you come in on a Saturday. This is why you get in the office at 5:30 a.m. This is why you skip your lunch. This is why you go to training. A lot of people, candidly, were gonna go play basketball at 3:00 in the afternoon because Larry built out all these amazing facilities with basketball courts, six restaurants, and all these things. I was like, "Nope — I'm gonna go back into training class. I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna learn negotiation skills. I'm gonna learn all these various courses you could take to learn about the technology." If you were a feverish learner and driven by growth, it was just a platform where you could run as fast as you could. His mindset was: "I don't care if you're 23 years old. I don't care if you went to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale. All I care about is your numbers — hit the numbers, get promoted." So, humbly, every year I got promoted in this company. They would joke when I joined the team, "Okay, we know you're gonna be our boss next year." But it just came down to work ethic and your ability to post up numbers against your peers. It was very competitive: the bottom 20% got cut, the top 20% got promoted. You could look around and it didn't matter age, race, or anything — it just came down to performance.
13:31	Shaan Puri	It's like a pro sports team more than anything else. People describe it as "we're a family" or say they try to create comfortable environments, but it sounds like this was more competitive and meritocratic in terms of the culture.
13:45	Hayes Barnard	Absolutely — it was high-risk, high-reward. If you performed, you were compensated accordingly. I made a tremendous amount of income as a young individual there. What you started to see was the confidence build among all these other individuals about what they could achieve when pushed to their peak performance level. You started to see people like Craig Conway leave and go run PeopleSoft at the time, which was our biggest competitor on the HR software side of the business. Tom Siebel left; he built this amazing software program we used to do all of our customer resource management called OASIS. Tom Siebel left to go start Siebel Systems and he created a great company. Another gentleman left to go start NetSuite. Marc Benioff left to go start Salesforce.com. You see all these individuals learning and believing in themselves and their ability to perform regardless of their background — whether a kid who grew up in Creve Coeur, Missouri, with his mom in an apartment while she worked three jobs and, you know, walked through the washer and dryer every day; or the guy who had an undergrad from Harvard and went to GSB at Stanford. You were all equals, right? Then you watch these people and their ability to go launch their own companies. In some cases, Larry was very supportive — he was a big investor in Salesforce.com when Marc left and did that. And then the others, he acquired: he acquired PeopleSoft back, he acquired Siebel Systems back, he acquired NetSuite back. So it was just really interesting to see collaborative alphas — a group of people that saw themselves as having the ability to create technology within the Valley and the level of respect and admiration that we all shared with one another.
15:34	Shaan Puri	Right—hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool. Our sponsor for this episode is HubSpot, but instead of the ad just telling you about HubSpot, they wanted to do something useful for you. They did some research and found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustles. They start a business on the side, they get it going, and then over time it becomes their main hustle. So instead of just telling you about HubSpot's features, they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle. They put together a database of AI prompts—things you can put into ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool that will help you with your side hustle. Check it out. It's going to save you a bunch of time. I think it's a prompt database you should be using to make your side hustle more successful. You can use this as your personal cheat sheet—a toolkit to be a better operator with your side hustle. You can either scan the QR code on the screen or get the link in the description to access the AI prompt database. Alright—back to the show. Thanks, HubSpot. You also get the itch to leave to start your own thing.
16:36	Hayes Barnard	Well, you see all those other individuals leave — you can't help but be inspired. </FormattedResponse>
16:39	Shaan Puri	Right, but you have a cushy job at that?
16:41	Hayes Barnard	"It wasn't cushy, I gotta tell you. Good money, let's say. Yeah—I was making good money. I was making really good money. When you're making seven figures and you're like, 'I don't know, man,' at 25 or 26 years old, from a kid in Missouri... you're like, your head explodes."
16:56	Shaan Puri	"What did you do with the money as a young..." [question trails off / sentence unfinished]
16:58	Hayes Barnard	Kid, by the way—did you [unintelligible]? I couldn't believe it was real. I just kept it in my bank account, you know.
17:02	Shaan Puri	Put it under the mattress.
17:03	Hayes Barnard	I was sharing an apartment with Matt Dawson down in the Marina in San Francisco. I ran across the Golden Gate Bridge every day, and Matt and I started to whiteboard all these crazy ideas in our apartment.
17:15	Shaan Puri	What was on the table? What was on the whiteboard? </FormattedResponse>
17:17	Hayes Barnard	We loved Tahoe. He and I built this home in Tahoe, and there was this guy—his name is Randy Palmine. Randy had a hot tub company, and Matt and I had this idea. I was like, "Man, we could just buy Randy Palmine's hot tub company. I'm sure Randy's a little checked out, he's getting older, he's ready to sell it." I mean, the annual recurring revenue from these hot tubs and the maintenance could be a great business around Lake Tahoe. "We'll snowboard in the winter, we'll wakesurf in the summer, and we'll just take care of the hot tub business." We almost did it—literally days away from the hot tub guy. We talked to our fiancés at the time (our wives now), and we were like, "Do you guys think you would move to Tahoe with us? We could all live in this one house that we built up in Kingswood Estates." You know, this house Matt and I built up there together. We'll raise our kids there, and we'll just sell hot tubs and maintain hot tubs. Let's put it this way: the wives shut that one down.
18:14	Shaan Puri	Mostly, living together was the problem.
18:16	Hayes Barnard	Yeah. They're like, "No, we're not doing that. We thought about starting a car wash." We put a bunch of time and energy into, "Hey, we could start all these different car washes together." Ultimately what we decided was—and this was based on a background of learning—that you could remotely sell anything. Once you realize you can sell really complex items—like we were selling from a software perspective—virtually over the internet, you're like, "Okay, you can sell anything virtually over the internet." It was a huge breakthrough moment for me in my career, and that led to everything else that I did. So ultimately I said, "Hey, what if we took Matt and Jason's background in residential mortgages and we just digitized it? We just created a virtual technology platform that allowed us to sell these mortgages and other financial products—maybe it could be insurance or other things—virtually."
19:09	Shaan Puri	So you were like, "I could take my sales playbook—maybe not playbook, but my sales experience—like I could sell this stuff over the phone and through the internet. But now let's find a product that might work for it. Not hot tubs, but mortgages." What was that? I guess—what was the sales model back then? Was this, like, Google Ads not leading into a phone call?
19:29	Hayes Barnard	Or is there Google Ads? There's barely any internet at this point in time.
19:33	Shaan Puri	What was the model? What were you doing?
19:34	Hayes Barnard	So, here—let's go back in time. 1997–1998 is when the internet really starts to catch its tailwinds. You start hearing about the dot-com verticals and all the big dot-com companies begin popping up. Back then, the internet was primarily a way to sell things online. It was like, "Hey, do you want to do a trade? Maybe do that on ETRADE." Do you remember Webvan? If you wanted to buy groceries or anything, you could buy them online and Webvan would deliver them. Books on Amazon—so it was basically a virtual retail environment where you could sell anything. That led people to think: what are complicated things that everybody needs in the world that you could bring into the virtual e-commerce world? It's what people are doing today with Agenteq AI*—the same idea. How do I take a complex, people-intensive business—maybe an insurance company, maybe a mortgage company—and bring Agenteq AI into it to automate it? That was what people were thinking about in 1997–1998. Our idea when I left in 2003... What happens is the dot-com crash happens in 2000 and everybody gets wiped out—85–90% of companies get wiped out. Google launches around 1998–1999. Once everyone gets crushed, Google comes up. That was my window. I said, "Okay, I've been here eight years. I've seen a lot of people come and go. I've seen tremendous success and tremendous failure. I think now I've got the maturity to think of a big enough idea that can really scale." Basically, I could take advantage of the internet wave. The information age had already happened—the earlier entrepreneurs had nailed it and became the wealthiest people in the world: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison. I basically created a bad version of Quicken Loans. Dan Gilbert and Quicken Loans did it a lot better than I did—same idea, same time. Dan was a little ahead of me and executed it significantly better. They bought Intuit, right? That was kind of like—they sort of branched out of Intuit. They had a tremendous amount of capital and they really invested in technology in a thoughtful way that allowed their organization to scale and build a bigger brand. Dan was older than me, more mature, and just a better entrepreneur than me.
22:12	Hayes Barnard	At that time, I was like a 30-year-old kid, right? You know, with the big dream—trying to figure it out with my two best friends from the fourth grade and my sophomore year of business school.
22:21	Shaan Puri	And you guys self-funded it? Did it work right away? Were you...?
22:24	Hayes Barnard	We totally self-funded it. I think we each put in, like, $50 or something along those lines. And, well — humbly — we created success very quickly. We decided to move to Sacramento, California from the Silicon Valley because we were going to do these cheesy radio commercials. I got stuck doing the cheesy radio commercials. I'm so embarrassed by it to this day. I literally would say, "Hey, hi — I'm Haze." Oh God, it was so bad. I had this breathy voice and I would be like, "Hi, I'm Haze Barnard... call me," and, you know, get a rate in the fours. The interest rates were in the fours for about ten years, so I just quoted the same rate for basically a decade of my life. My last line was, "I'm so confident I can save you money, I'll even pay for your home to be appraised." This was when Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and all these players either charged you $600 for an appraisal. I thought, "Okay, that's a nice thing to do — I'll give you the appraisal for free if you just give us an opportunity to do your mortgage online." But it's just funny, the things you do, Sean. Oh wait — have you ever done anything like that? When you look back at your life and go, "I cannot believe I actually did that," was it a stepping stone that got you to another stage in your life?
23:38	Shaan Puri	Our business was a sushi restaurant chain. I think I did, and then even worse — this was before DoorDash and before Uber Eats. It was delivery-only because we didn't want to sign a ten-year lease. We didn't even know if people wanted this concept. We were trying to build the Chipotle of sushi. I used to go not door-to-door, but floor-to-floor in a skyscraper because I realized the front-desk lady orders lunch for everybody in the office. The most viral way to teach everybody in the office that we exist was to get that person to order for the whole floor. If I could just schmooze the first front-desk lady, I could get a floor of business. So I'd go in the elevator, sneak in because I didn't have a badge, press one, get out, schmooze her, then go back, press two, and keep going up — like a 50-floor building. Again, our business idea was objectively terrible. It was clearly a terrible idea, but that type of selling was actually pretty interesting. We made a bunch of mistakes, and the story was kind of good. It led to the next guy who met me — this guy had just sold his company for $500 million. He found our story so amusing that he said, "I just want you guys to come do something with me." I think if we had not done something interesting or amusing that made him literally laugh, I don't think he would have wanted to take a bet on us. He kind of just saw, "Okay, these guys are hustlers — they're kind of stupid, but maybe, pointed in the right direction, they'll do something. Or at least they'll bring some good energy; they'll make me feel young and alive again." I don't know what his reason was, but...
25:01	Hayes Barnard	Yeah.
25:02	Shaan Puri	It led to the next opportunity, and the next.
25:03	Hayes Barnard	Isn't it funny, though? People always say, "How'd you make it?" I'm like, well—I started carrying golf bags at the local country club when I was eight years old. I would carry one bag when I was eight. By the time I was nine, I would carry two. I would walk in your line and talk while you were putting. I was a total knucklehead, but they kind of liked me. They were like, "Hey, I like this kid; he rides his bike here for an hour to come carry two golf bags at the Bell Reef Country Club." There were all these rich guys at the Bell Reef Country Club that I got to meet. Wow— you guys are members of this super nice country club in Saint Louis, Missouri. Then I would get $20 a bag and they would buy me a hot dog at the turn. I'm like, "Okay, cool, man." I did that from eight to nine. Yeah—I'm living.
25:44	Shaan Puri	"Large dude, if you give me $20 and a hot dog today, I'm happy. Exactly." </FormattedResponse>
25:48	Hayes Barnard	When I think about the waterfall of all my gigs — the things I did — I remember being a sandwich artist at Subway. They wouldn't let you work at Subway until you were 18, but I got this guy, Jim [last name unclear], who was the manager. I told him, "Look, man, please. I promise I'm really mature. I've had this job — I've been working for a while." By the time I was 15, I'd ride my bike to Subway and work as a sandwich artist. I would make the best sandwiches. I'd carve the loaf — back in the day when they carved the loaf and put the bread perfectly in there. People would wait in line and be like, "Nope — waiting for the kid."
26:22	Shaan Puri	We want him, yeah.
26:23	Hayes Barnard	The kid gets more black olives — he gives you more, more, more. You know, pickles. I would work there till two in the morning when I was, like, 15 years old. This is another funny one: I worked at Amoco. I worked at a gas station, so I'd be the guy who would come out, check your tires, fill up your tank, check your oil, and wash your windows. When the grease-monkey guys gave me a nod—these guys were amazing, incredible mentors of mine—they'd say, "Okay, Hayes, you can do an alternator, or you can do a headlight, or you can change... you know, you can plug a few tires or take it off." I'd clean these guys' tools. They'd make fun of me, just capping on me all day long. If a tool had a little bit of grease on it they'd be like, "Nope, do it again, kid." We had this funny rapport. They would leave the whole bays just trashed, and Jason Walker and I would literally go in there and race to see how fast we could clean the bays. As kids, Jason and I would clean the bays, we'd put the soap down and I'd say, "Dude, we can clean these bays in 15 minutes today." Of course, naturally later in my life I'm like, "We gotta work together — we can read each other's minds."
27:32	Shaan Puri	Right.
27:32	Hayes Barnard	We work so efficiently together, but it started in a gas station in Missouri. It began with a bunch of guys who just—well, we had the best rapport with this awesome group of people at the Amoco on Olive and Phe Phe Road. It just goes from thing to thing—working out on a farm after that. It gives you the ability to have humility and these stepping stones in your life, where you meet people and they say, "Okay, you know, these are things I need to do to be successful." I learned so many lessons from these people. </FormattedResponse>
28:05	Shaan Puri	"Before you picked up your nickname thing — because you're a — you're a big nickname giver."
28:09	Hayes Barnard	"It's something I kinda stole from you, like the nicknames."
28:11	Shaan Puri	I was like, "Hayes — everyone he meets..." I was like he kind of has a nickname for him right away, and it builds this rapport right away. Yeah, because look, I live in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of rich and successful people there. There aren't many people who have the fun-to-hang charm that you have.
28:28	Hayes Barnard	Oh, it's like, "oh." </FormattedResponse>
28:29	Shaan Puri	I want to steal a little bit from your game on that. You know—you... it's almost a big country. Oh, what's going on here? So, like, you know, Ben is in my phone now. It's Ben "Big Dog" Levy, right? It's like, "Yeah, I'm gonna—I'm just giving nicknames out now. That's going to be my thing." Is that something you intentionally picked up?
28:44	Hayes Barnard	From somebody where I picked it up: this guy is Zeke Seger that I used to work for. Zeke was like the black sheep of the Seger family. The Seger family owned all the car dealerships in Missouri. Zeke loved to gamble, he loved to drink beer, and he loved to play golf. He had a family farm and he started a driving range on the family farm. I was "Johnny, come cut the grass" — make sure that all the tee lines were set right. Zeke had nicknames for everybody who worked for him. I'll tell you, he taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life, and this one I passed on to my kids. I did everything as fast as I possibly could because I learned at the gas station: just do it fast, get an attaboy from your boss, get the gold star, go on to the next day. He brings me in and he had all these nicknames for everybody. This is my second summer there. He said, "You're fired." I was like, "What, Zeke? What's going on?" He had his little Budweiser in his hand and he said: > "Yeah, you're fired. You're out of here. > Every day you come out here and you run around and you get all these little things done real quick. You go out there and you weed-eat the railroad tracks, you pull the weeds out of the sand traps, you set the tee lines — you do it faster than everybody else. > The problem is you come in here at 11:00 every morning after you get everything done and you ask me what you should do for the rest of the day. 'Hey Zeke, I got all that done — what do you want me to do?' You do it every single day, and you've done it for a year straight. You're fired." I said, "Well, Zeke, I'm not leaving. Come on, man — you can't fire me for something like this." He said, "No, you're absolutely fired. I don't want to see you for the rest of the summer. Don't come in here and don't ask me what to do again." I was angry. I went out there and I picked those balls, and at 11:00 every morning I'd look around and think, "Okay, I probably need to take the hay up into the barn. I probably need to go out there and clean the barbecue pit." I didn't talk to him for the rest of the summer. I was like, "I'm not going in there one time." At the end of the summer — my last day before going back to school — he asked, "You coming back next summer?" I said, "Yeah, I'd love to come back next summer." He said, "You're the boss." He gave me this big ring of keys and said, "Here you go." I said, "What?" He said, "You're the boss." I said, "All these guys are ten years older than me." He said, "You're the boss of all of them now because you know why? You didn't come here and ask me what to do. You knew exactly what to do." That stuck with me for the rest of my life. When I worked at Oracle with Larry Ellison, I never went to Dean Panzeca's office once and asked him what to do. I never went to Hillary Koplow's office once and asked him what to do. I thought, "Okay, what would they want me to do as the boss?" When you do that, you become the boss.
31:45	Shaan Puri	Yeah. You think like the boss; you become the boss.
31:46	Hayes Barnard	You become the boss, yeah. So it's the person that goes in there looking for the "attaboy," looking for the pat on the back, looking for the affirmation, or asking, "Hey, what's the next thing you want me to do?" They're never the boss.
31:56	Shaan Puri	Right — it's BYO: you bring your own clarity, right, versus being a sort of "direction-taker" at all times.
32:02	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, yeah — a lot of people get that wrong.
32:04	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. So, if we go back into the story for a second: you leave, you're doing the radio ads, so the business is working. You start to build this business. Now, a mortgage business sounds like a good business to be in, but there's always bumps and bruises in any kind of roller coaster. So, what happens with that business?
32:25	Hayes Barnard	Well, 2008—the financial crisis. On Douglas Boulevard, where our office was, I think 95% of mortgage companies went out of business. A lot of people didn't have their hedge positions right; they blew themselves up because interest rates had increased. Also, the firms that did subprime mortgages were done. We were lucky: we didn't do a lot of subprime mortgages, and we didn't do any reverse-amortization mortgages.
32:49	Shaan Puri	So, I wanted to ask you about this. So—you're in the... you're in the eye of...
32:53	Hayes Barnard	The storm.
32:53	Shaan Puri	Right, like the '08 crisis, which is the subprime mortgage crisis [the 2008 financial crisis]. You're in the mortgage business.
32:58	Hayes Barnard	"I'm in it."
32:59	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you know, I've watched The Big Short—that's my level of knowledge about this. I'm curious: a) What happened? From your perspective, what's your kind of layman's explanation of what actually went wrong? b) How did you avoid falling into the same trap that many others did? It seems like there was an incentive to issue these subprime mortgages because you were going to make more money.
33:19	Hayes Barnard	Every mortgage sales guy in the country at that time wanted to sell reverse-amortization mortgages and wanted to sell subprime mortgages. Stated-income loans were the big thing, right? "Let's just have someone make up their income and we'll give them any loan we can."
33:32	Shaan Puri	"A stated loan. So you pay — I'm good for it."
33:34	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, yeah. I'm good for it. No — you would basically say, "Hey, Sean, what's your income?" And you would say, "Oh, I make $200,000 a year." "Okay, great — $200,000 a year: you're qualified for this loan." So, what happened at the end of the day was there were a bunch of loans that people received that they shouldn't have received.
33:46	Shaan Puri	Okay.
33:46	Hayes Barnard	Okay, the underwriting criteria wasn't tight enough. That's what happened — that's why the crisis happened. The default rates skyrocketed. People walked away from their homes. They were like, "Hey, I don't know... I have no equity in this house at all. Who cares? I'll just walk away. I'll take the light fixtures out of here," right? And, you know, whatever else they...
34:04	Shaan Puri	Also, we're putting a lot down, then, basically.
34:07	Hayes Barnard	They were putting nothing down.
34:08	Shaan Puri	So, nothing down—stated income.
34:10	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, and so that felt really, really wrong to me. Morally, I was like, "The devil doesn't tempt you with spinach." Okay? Alright. And so you're like, you know... it's like, "Oh, you know," and then the sales guys would come in — the mortgage guys: "Hey man, if people want red cars, we gotta sell red cars. If people want hamburgers, we gotta sell them hamburgers." I heard every analogy under the sun. I'm like, "We're not selling hamburgers. We're not selling red cars." I don't know how this movie ends, but those people don't deserve those loans. So we're gonna walk away from the volume — and we did. We walked away from a tremendous amount of volume. We walked away from a tremendous number of people who wanted to come work for us, take advantage of our cheesy radio commercials, and the brand that we had created for ourselves and sell those loans. Because what do they care? They'll just sell those loans until that company blows up and then they'll go on to the next company. So I give Jason and Matt a ton of credit here. Jason has a brilliant mind for underwriting criteria and he has huge ethics. He basically said, "Man, it's not right. It doesn't smell right. We shouldn't do it." Jason and Matt were experts in the industry, and I said, "Then great — we're not doing it." It was a hard decision at the time because, you're right, everybody else was doing it. It was the only reason we survived. There were so many buybacks from other companies; they just said, "Hey, we can't buy them back, we're out." We had done some stated loans and we had to buy some of those back, but it wasn't anywhere near the magnitude it would have been if we had done subprime loans and those kinds of things.
35:42	Shaan Puri	"You sort of look wrong until you look right in that situation. It means you're just growing a little bit slower than other people, or you're leaving money on the table until, finally, the crash happens — and then you're validated for that strategy. But most people are not willing to be wrong for 364 days for the one that was right." </FormattedResponse>
36:05	Hayes Barnard	You know, a lot of times it's more than 364 days. Sometimes it's three years. I just went through that in the residential solar financing business. There have been about five companies that went bankrupt recently in that space. We raised pricing, I think, 16 times because the Fed had raised rates so much in a short period of time. It was hard because we lost a lot of market share for a while. People said, "Hey, you guys are going to have to increase your pricing," but the bond math didn't work — the unit economics didn't work. I was like, if the unit economics don't work, at some point the music stops and you die. You blow yourself up. The reason we were a healthy company and survived was for two reasons: diversification and discipline. The devil doesn't tempt you with spinach. The second piece, going back to the mortgage side, is what happens after ’08 [the 2008 financial crisis]. I had to lay off 400 people. We had a couple—I'd say—1,500 employees or something along those lines. I was so depressed. I would literally throw up in my driveway before I could go see my family every night. They say, "You're never a real CEO until you go through a near-death experience," and I went through mine there. I would go to this rock and literally pray, "Just get me through this and I promise you I'll do good things for the world." What I did was diversify. I launched an insurance company next to the mortgage company that allowed us to save people money on their homeowners and auto insurance. Then I had the idea to get into the energy business and save people money on their electrical bills — the way I did that was through the residential solar business. So diversification can be a good thing. It forces you to diversify risk within your company. But you've got to have the unit economic discipline up front and a good sense of ethics — doing the right thing — especially when other competitors may or may not be willing to do that.
38:02	Shaan Puri	So where does that strategy come from? Where do the… what are the ideas to do insurance, energy? Because you're in the middle of a—you're weathering a storm, you're laying off people. When I was little, I accidentally almost burned down my house. You know, everyone in the neighborhood was looking at you, like, "He tried to bake a cookie and almost burned down the house," you know?
38:23	Hayes Barnard	Yeah.
38:24	Shaan Puri	The mortgage industry almost burned down the house of America—totally. So you're in a tough spot. Where do these ideas come from at that stage?
38:30	Hayes Barnard	Man, it's when your soul's getting crushed that you get the download. That was it for me. When I worked at Oracle, I would run to the Golden Gate Bridge most mornings. I sat in a meeting where, with HP, we had just done a really big deal. What I realized at the time was: yeah, they maybe needed this software as a CRM solution — it was a new CRM solution for Oracle — but likely it was a horse-trading deal. I was part of a reciprocity between Oracle buying a lot of HP servers, laptops, and printers, and in return HP saying, "Hey, we're going to take a risk here and buy a CRM solution from Oracle." I just felt a little bit like, is this what I'm going to do with my life? Am I going to be in these rooms, working with legal groups for half a year to get these deals done, only for it to be a trade in some way, shape, or form at the end of the day? I wanted more meaning in my life. So I thought about what was important to me. My mom and I never owned a home—we rented our entire lives. I watched her pay $400 a month in rent the whole time. We were always strapped. I always watched my mom work three jobs. I was always like, "Mom, can't you get educated and buy a home?" I was just talking to a good friend of mine a few days ago. He's from the inner city in St. Louis and he said, "As you realize, our people the way we grew up will never buy a home unless someone really sits down and educates them." That was my dream: could I create a mortgage company that could educate people online, that could educate people in a nonthreatening way, where they could learn about the ability to own a home instead of renting their whole life—the American dream of owning a home? I found meaning in that, and I found another group of people who found meaning in that. Of course, I hired a bunch of processors and underwriters who were single moms because I was raised by a single mom. I asked my mom to move from Chicago—at the time she was taking care of her mother—to Sacramento to come work with me and be alongside me. She retired this year, but she was with me for whatever it was, fifteen solid years or more. Then that led me to think, what if I could educate people on their homeowners insurance and auto insurance and how to protect these assets? I found, candidly, a vision for what could really solve a big problem that also ties to a big bill inside the home. That was the electric bill, clean energy, and the ability to electrify the home. That is an amazing opportunity. I would advertise with the cheesy ad: "I can save you money on your biggest bills," and people would call in. We would save them money on their mortgage payment, their homeowners and auto insurance, and their electric bill. That created diversification, but it also allowed me to see what three separate entities under one holding company could do to make an impact in homeowners' lives.
41:30	Shaan Puri	Right, I want to read you a quote that I really liked. You said: > "The difference between rejection and results is just how long you stick with it."
41:38	Hayes Barnard	And this is like...
41:39	Shaan Puri	You know, on one hand it's kind of just fortune-cookie advice, but for some reason it hit for me. I guess—where did you get that? And can you unpack it—what's the story there?
41:49	Hayes Barnard	Look, I think a lot of people quit when it gets hard. Sometimes you don't even know you're quitting — you just come up with a reason why you think you need to quit. It's like, I had no choice; I just had to quit, right?
42:00	Shaan Puri	You become a master salesman to yourself, too. You're in the other direction.
42:04	Hayes Barnard	Yep. You want to run it by all your friends who are going to tell you to quit. How do you do that? You start approaching those people. "I know the five guys that'll tell me I should quit—I'm gonna call those five guys," and then they'll all tell me it's okay to quit. Then I'm like, "I'm blessed for quitting." What happens to a lot of companies is that they go through really challenging, difficult times. It's inevitable if you run these companies. They are riddled with problems, and you're always constantly solving the next problem. In some way, shape, or form these cycles are cyclical. They always face some massive headwind — it could be a policy headwind, a financial headwind because of interest rates, a headwind because of tariffs. Whatever it is, you're going to face one. The key in those moments when you're getting your soul crushed is to find a way to get through it — to find a way to not quit, to make sure the team stays together and does not quit. "The valley is the value." No one realizes that when all your competition dies and they're going out of business one after another — maybe because of a bad decision, maybe because they lost the team due to lack of inspiration, or maybe it just got too hard and people were fed up — that is the moment where your company is actually creating value. It might not show in your stock price or necessarily in your board meeting, but that's the difference. I just went through a really crazy, difficult cycle in residential solar [industry] over the last two-and-a-half to three years. Usually these cycles only last about a year; this one lasted two-and-a-half to three. We've diversified significantly, made a bunch of investments, and innovated in really big ways. The valley is the value, and 99% of people quit in the moment. They think, "Maybe I should just join the board, or maybe I should do something else," because winners have options. If you've got a little money in the bank, you might say, "You know what? I'm just gonna go do something else with my life — this is too much of an opportunity cost to sit here and slug it out." But if you grind it out during those moments, two things happen. One: you gain tremendous market share and respect from your board. Two: you see yourself as a different person in the face of adversity. The muscle you create and what you have to learn to get through that moment makes you a stronger executive for the next wave of pain that's going to come your way.
44:30	Shaan Puri	Mhmm. When you were at SolarCity — I mean, SolarCity is kind of a controversial company. From the outside it looked like this incredible company; then Tesla was going to acquire it, and people asked, "Is it in good financial health or not?" There's a lot of narrative around it. Did you learn anything about the internal storytelling that's required to not only get yourself to believe, but to get the whole team to believe when there's a lot of noise on the outside?
44:58	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, absolutely. Don't listen to the noise. I have thin skin, which is why I don't do Twitter and why I don't do podcasts. I don't want to read all the comments of people saying, "Oh gosh, that guy..." I don't know why — I care. Some people don't care, right? I'm like, I actually care.
45:14	Shaan Puri	Really care. Some people say they don't care.
45:15	Hayes Barnard	I... but I care. I really care. I'm not good at the public thing. I'm not good at putting myself out there, which is why I don't do any self-promotion or anything along those lines. I'm not man enough to take the blows that come my way. I'm embarrassed to say that, but that's really the truth of it: if I make myself vulnerable... So for me, I don't read the articles. I don't look at acts all the time, or at all the comments and things along those lines. I keep my head down, stay focused, and try to feed my mind with the right things. That's why I don't watch scary movies. If I watch a scary movie, it's stuck in my head for a month. I'm not man enough to watch scary movies. I just want to watch happy things — comedies, inspirational films, some great documentary. I'm just really careful about what narratives, what you...
46:07	Shaan Puri	Let in.
46:08	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, it also comes down to who I'm going to hang out with. It's weird, man. When I met my dad, there was a part of me where I would see things in my father, and I didn't like it. After I hung out with him, I was like, "Oh wow... I do some of those things too." Is that DNA-based? You start to question who you are as an individual, right? So you have to be really careful with the kind of people you spend your time with and the dialogue you're having with them, because proximity is a powerful thing. It cuts both ways.
46:40	Shaan Puri	Right. What was it like meeting Elon the first time? Would you have suspected then, when you met him, that — like — the rise, basically? I mean, now he's, I don't know, the wealthiest guy in the world. He's created these world-changing companies. Yeah. I'm just curious: what was your impression at that stage? </FormattedResponse>
46:58	Hayes Barnard	I thought I had a great work ethic when I was working with Larry Ellison or when I had my own company. No company has the work ethic, commitment, and sacrifice factor of an Elon company. When you go to work for those companies... my son works at SpaceX right now. He's doing his second-year internship down at SpaceX. Out of all the companies in the world that I would hope my son could go work for — he's 19 years old — I'm like, "Go work for Elon, man. Go see what it's like at SpaceX. Go down to Boca Chica. Go light some rockets off with Mark Giacosa. See what it's like to have that level of work ethic, that 'give-a-shit' factor." When you're in those kinds of environments, it's like, look: you're playing with live ammunition. You gotta play full out. You're in the foxhole; it's time to go to war. We're the warriors of light: you go hard or go home. That's just the way it is. Think about it — we were the most highly shorted stock in the history of the world between Tesla and SolarCity. Everyone said, "We're the next Enron." We were done. The articles were crazy. At that time we were the biggest morons in the world — the clean energy guys, the sustainability guys — and there was no way we could ever create a company of any value. Well, that narrative has changed. To be very direct, it was obvious to me that Elon was the ultimate alpha. He had a leadership skill and a magnetic energy to get human beings to make the necessary sacrifices to build the most important, disruptive, impactful technologies in the history of the world. I worked so hard. I never stopped working for nine years of my life — I'm not kidding. I just wanted him to be happy. He was always so kind to me and so grateful. I would always get a kind nod in the boardroom. I just wanted Linden to be happy. I wanted Pete to be happy. I wanted E to be happy. There is a sacrifice that everyone makes when you work at those companies: a sense of pride, commitment, and sacrifice that's necessary. It's based on being driven by growth and by being around peers and alphas who push themselves to be the best they can be, driven by contribution and by the difference you can make in the world.
49:29	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I have this phrase: "You don't know what level of TED looks like." Basically, I have this theory — which, really, this podcast actually helps me do — that in any area of my life, at a certain time I think, "Oh, okay, I know what the spectrum is. I know what one is at the bottom, and I know what a ten is." Sometimes I fool myself into thinking I'm a ten at this thing. Then you go meet somebody who totally breaks your frame, and you're like, "Oh, that's what— that's what..." I call it Level 11. Level 11 is like, "Oh, I didn't even realize the knob actually goes further. You could just crank this baby."
50:04	Hayes Barnard	Up, yeah.
50:05	Shaan Puri	So whether it's work ethic, storytelling ability, or just how sharp they are... work ethic is part of it. One of my companies got bought by Twitch and I got to work with this guy, Emmett. Emmett's the CEO/founder of Twitch. People ask, "What's Emmett like?" I could tell you a lot of things, but one thing that was very obvious to me was: this guy just burns a little hotter — he's genuinely much smarter than me. I hadn't really encountered people at that level of incisiveness and sharpness of ability. It's inspiring. At Amazon, you write a six-page memo and you come in and the first ten minutes are a silent read. I'm reading this thing and within three minutes he's done with the paper — he's highlighted the one thing, the needle in the haystack, the one thing that actually matters and is worth talking about — and he's waiting for the rest of us to catch up. So I love seeing level 11. In fact, that's why when we came out here we did your morning routine with you.
51:03	Hayes Barnard	Yeah.
51:04	Shaan Puri	"Because you're kind of like a level 11 of energy — like you're energy-rich. I don't even know how old you are, but you're way more energetic than me. I think I'm like 20 years younger than you. You have 20 times more energy than me." </FormattedResponse>
51:14	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, 52. 52.</FormattedResponse>
51:15	Shaan Puri	So I thought I was a pretty high-energy guy, and I have a certain vivaciousness for life. But then you see... "Oh, that's 11." Okay, good.
51:22	Hayes Barnard	"Yeah."
51:22	Shaan Puri	Now I can recalibrate. I'm actually at a seven—cool. But now that I've seen it, that's a very important thing: it's literally just to see it. So, I hope with this—when I do this podcast—we've talked to so many people, done whatever, 500, 600 episodes. The goal is that you break some people's frames. Yeah.
51:38	Hayes Barnard	And what is the commitment — the sacrifices — necessary? Think about it. They buy my company. The first one, Paramount Solar, rolled into SolarCity. I had this big, first exit of my life. What did I do the next day? I packed up my stuff and moved into a studio apartment in San Francisco by myself. Remember, I'm married. I have a wife and three kids. I said, "I'll see you guys in a year. I'm going down to Silicon Valley — don't worry. I'm gonna do this. I'll buy us a house. I'll figure it all out. Kids are in school," all those kinds of things. I ate a burrito four nights a week at one in the morning in my little studio apartment in South San Francisco before I went and built an organization. We grew that organization from maybe 1,500 of us max at the time — I think I brought 400 of the 1,500 — to a 20,000-person organization that did 20,000 residential solar systems a month. It became the largest solar company in the history of the world. But it's that intoxicating energy you're feeding off when you sit around Lyndon Rive and you see his spirit and his energy. It's literally every moment of every day. I don't care if we were mountain biking, kite surfing, or on vacation in Cabo — we were talking about work. We were talking about different ways we could engineer things, different ways we could create and do things. It was amazing to be around those kinds of people, where you're absorbing that energy and that competitive spirit to do something no one had ever been able to do before — especially when the rest of the world thinks you're crazy and there's no way it's gonna work.
53:15	Shaan Puri	"It's... I'm gonna make a guess — you tell me if this is right. It seems like, maybe prior to that... well, you could just say, 'I found my tribe.' It's like, 'yeah.'"
53:23	Hayes Barnard	For a
53:23	Shaan Puri	While it's like you don't really quite fit in — you're sort of an oddball. Then you finally meet a group of people who are wired the way you're wired, who think the way you think, who talk the way you talk, and it's totally normal to be... you're weird. It's gotta be a good feeling, right? Like, it — it — it was that. How was it for you?
53:37	Hayes Barnard	Totally. When I was in Missouri, I was a fish out of water, man. I was depressed. I was frustrated listening to the conversations around the kitchen table. I was frustrated listening to conversations on the field. There was this level of Eeyore skepticism, self-doubt, and highly medicated mindsets that lacked ambition. They were like, "Man, you're just too excited about life. Chill out, have a cigarette and relax. Life isn't that great, buddy." I knew I needed to leave. I knew I needed to pack my car up, and I would have gone further than Silicon Valley if the ocean wasn't there. Honestly, I didn't come home for a long time. I stayed out west for a very, very long time. The reason was I was suddenly around people that were believers. I was around people who were excited about things and who weren't getting caught up in what they were going to have for dinner at night, or the two cups of coffee they needed in the morning to get themselves going, or the smoke. I was like, "Oh man, this is incredible." Then I was around those people at Oracle—really, really bright people operating on a high frequency. They were hyper-motivated to do something with their lives. Then you kind of graduate to, "Hey, I'm a founder in Silicon Valley," with other peers and founders. I got plugged into that group of—woah—these are the greatest founders in the world: Sergey Brin, Larry Page, all the PayPal Mafia, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery. All of a sudden you were around this peer group of friends that you spent time with and you're like, "I can do anything." If I hang out with these guys and feed off this energy every morning, I can do anything. Honestly, I still feel that way today. This is why I love spending time with people like you. I love the young energy. There's a guy—his name's Keller; he's the founder of Zipline. I just went and visited him at his office a couple weeks ago in San Francisco.
55:40	Shaan Puri	Drone delivery.
55:40	Hayes Barnard	The drone delivery... I just... I want to be around Keller. He and I went on a hilly trip together; we went snowboarding and became friends. He's like, "Hey man, come visit my office; I got a lot of things to do." I wanted to go to Keller's office, visit with Keller, and just see his operation and what he's doing. I'm really thoughtful about trying to find other people with great energy, great ambition, and drive—people who are trying to do impactful things in the world—and bring them into my life.
56:08	Shaan Puri	So if, through that door, came—like—27‑year‑old you, right? You get a second because you're busy, and you're doing things, and you're already in what you're in. You're running your company. If 27‑year‑old you comes in and he's got all the time in the world and he says, "Alright, what's the blueprint? What's the Hayes Barnard way of doing things? Where should I go? I mean, where should I direct my energy?" What do you think you would—how would you explain your way of doing this? And what ideas, specifically—what problems do you think are worth solving that you might plant a seed about in the head of 27‑year‑old you?
56:42	Hayes Barnard	Man, that's such a good question. With the gray hair that I have today, I'd probably drop in with them and say, "You're going to be addicted to success." You're going to be addicted to productivity. You're a workaholic because you're constantly trying to prove to everybody that you're enough. You're going to take on a lot, and at times it will feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. You're fighting for clean energy tax credits and the big beautiful bill in D.C., meeting with senators and all the things. But I need you to think about more than one level of wealth and one level of success, which is the financial success. I need you to think about time success. I need you to think about mental health success. I need you to think about physical health success. And I want you to think about friendship and community success. I'm afraid that you're going to sacrifice those other four pillars of success for one, which is financial success. You have to realize, when you grew up like I did—when your mom has her head in her hands and she's crying about whether she can turn the air conditioning on, and she's this amazing woman—all you want to do is help. All you want to do is carry a couple golf bags and put $40 down on the kitchen table to make sure you can turn the air conditioning on. All you want to do is someday hire your mom to come work for your company and say, "Hey, we're good. It's okay." All you want to do is give your wife the life that your mother never had, give your son the life that you never had. You're willing to make this crazy level of success so you have the financial means to make sure they can go to that private school, go to that university they want someday. Well, that causes you to make this massive amount of success and give up maybe any time for yourself. Maybe your mental health suffers because you grind out and your adrenal glands are shot. Your doctors are like, "Hey, man, we got to get you on meds so that you can get your thyroid back in order because you've blown it out." I'm at a stage now where I tell that 27-year-old guy, "Look, man, the goal is to also solve for happiness. You don't need to be a martyr. You don't need to just devote your life to all these other people and all these other things and die miserable at some point."
59:14	Hayes Barnard	In time, I need you to make sure that you're working out every morning. You're doing the breathwork, you're doing the swim, you're doing the HIIT workout with your friends. You're laughing, you're playing. Because as you create more success, it gets really, really difficult—the number of people that start targeting you and coming after you. For example, someone will watch this podcast and say, "Man, that's a really nice couch—he shouldn't have that nice couch right there." At times I think, "Man, I probably shouldn't have that nice couch. Maybe I don't deserve that nice couch." So it's this whole mindset that I think you have to consider. If you're a really driven person asking, "Why are you doing it? What are you doing?"—it's the how component. How do you start politely declining certain things? How do you avoid FOMO for all the things you feel like you need to show up for? I feel like I need to be in two cities in the same day, have two different meetings, and do both in person. You just burn yourself out on the whole thing. So I need to—tell that kid—take time for yourself. Create space. Give yourself an opportunity to kind of rev down every once in a while. You'll be better off in the long run. We need you around for the long haul.
01:00:25	Shaan Puri	Right. Yeah, because you've been around the—you know, whatever the dinner table of success is: like the top of the top. You've been around a lot of those people. You don't need to name names, but I would imagine that a lot of those people are a bit of a martyr in the sense that they're not that happy, or maybe not loving their life in the way one would assume when you have a certain level of success. Has that been true from your experience?
01:00:49	Hayes Barnard	Or yeah, I would say most of the really successful people I know have a meaningful amount of sadness in their lives because of the sacrifice. Maybe it's a lack of connection with their kids. Maybe it's a lack of connection with an ex-wife. They kind of regret the way they interacted at certain times, because you're revving in the conference room and battling all day long in these intense discussions. It's hard to come back home and then just be a chilled, normal guy. You're never a chilled, normal guy — you always have a less intense look on your face, you don't smile as much, and people wonder, "Is that guy okay? He needs to chill out a little bit." So, for sure, with that level of sacrifice you gather more demons in your life. And—it's sad to say that—but "money doesn't make you happy. Money doesn't make you a better person." The more things that you have, the more stressful it actually is. People who maybe don't have a lot of things might say, "Oh man, how trite of you to say something like that," but the reality is this: the only thing that matters at the end of the day are the relationships you have and the love you have — those deep relationships that you carry on.
01:02:05	Shaan Puri	Who's the exception? I'm sure there's somebody out there that's found these balances, right? </FormattedResponse>
01:02:11	Hayes Barnard	I have a few north stars. One of them is Michael Dell — he's kind of the biggest north star I've ever met in my life. His marriage to Susan is amazing. His wife is incredible; she's her own force of nature. What they do philanthropically and for the world is significant, and they're very humble. You're not going to read about it everywhere, but the impact they make is real. Their children are remarkable too. Their son, Zach Dell, is someone I admire. I tell my son Luke: > "Hey, can you spend time with Zach, read the books Zach reads, and talk to Zach?" He's a pretty amazing guy. What stands out to me is Michael's humility. He politely declines things when needed and creates space to read and relax. He didn't go crazy like a lot of people who, after creating enormous wealth, lose themselves in the intoxicating environment of "winners have options" — where you can have and do anything. Instead, he becomes more humble, more of a giver, and more focused on the impact he can make in the world through all the organizations he supports. He still plays big — don't get me wrong. He's a bold leader who takes big swings and big bets. This isn't a guy going through the motions. But he carries a level of humility that I deeply respect and admire.
01:03:40	Shaan Puri	Tell me about the Blue Ocean Strategy insight you had. We haven't even talked about your current company—the main company—yet, which is kind of a juggernaut. But talk about this insight you had.
01:03:53	Hayes Barnard	Alright. Well, what do you do after we sold SolarCity to Tesla? Elon was great — he wrote me a really nice letter and cc'd the Tesla board about it. So you're kind of like, "Okay..." I exited there gracefully, I think, as much as you can. People always want you to come back and do different things. At times I feel guilty that I didn't go back and help, but where do you go from there? My insight was that we were by far the biggest solar company in the country. We had a 40% market share in the United States. I was recruiting a lot of people from our competitors, and we were building the largest manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere for solar panels. Tesla had built the Gigafactory, and we were at a stage where I thought, "Man, I'm very passionate about sustainability. I'm really passionate about the deployment of these solutions." I had been burned out on sales a little bit. I was managing around a 10,000-person sales organization, which meant a lot of texts from sales professionals who wanted a raise — I'm joking, but they wanted to talk about their compensation. I was just like, how do I do something that's not really sales-focused but is technology-focused and lets me deploy these solutions? I was coming off a big high, and I had read a book called Blue Ocean Strategy. We were in a bit of a "red ocean" mindset — like, "beat your competition, beat your competition, just beat your competition." I started thinking, what if I could make my competition our biggest partner instead of our biggest competitor? And so I looked at — explain
01:05:28	Shaan Puri	With respect to the premise of the "bluisher strategy", what does it mean? </FormattedResponse>
01:05:30	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, it means: if you can make sure everybody wins in an environment where literally even your competitors win, that creates a flywheel effect that allows the organization to scale. "Red oceans" is like testosterone: You run a solar company, I run a solar company — I'm better than you. We're going to sell more than you. We're going to win that customer. "Ocean strategy" is like, Hey, what do you need? Can I support you in some way, shape, or form? To illustrate: imagine you and I are both gold miners panning for gold. "Blue ocean" is like, I want to be the guy who sells the picks and shovels to everybody. So the mindset was: if I can enable the entire ecosystem — from all the panel manufacturers to all the battery manufacturers, to all the different installers in the marketplace, to all the sales professionals — and empower them with a B2B marketplace and platform that allows them to have access to capital and access to each other, in an environment where they can transact with consumers and the consumer wins, then everyone benefits. The consumer electrifies the home, lowers their carbon footprint, and saves money. The installers win because they can install any panel or any battery solution in the marketplace. All the manufacturers win because they get access to that marketplace and the ability to deploy these assets. Boy, that would be a cool business — and that was the beginning of the idea of GoodLeap. It started with?
01:06:52	Hayes Barnard	Off-sale financing for solar, which quickly led to: "Wait a minute — we should finance all electrified solutions in the home." HVAC, energy-efficient windows, roofing, smart thermostats, synthetic grass/turf — basically anything that allows us to lower the carbon footprint in the home. That would be a blue ocean strategy. So now the banks and financial institutions are winning because they're getting their 8–10% return on the assets. All the installers are winning because they have access to these great products and great sales professionals. And all the sales professionals are winning because they have access to the installers and the products. So that was a blue ocean strategy in a marketplace business that allowed us to grow pretty quickly.
01:07:35	Shaan Puri	Can you tell the "dad story"? You told us this privately. </FormattedResponse>
01:07:39	Hayes Barnard	You don't have to say it if...
01:07:39	Shaan Puri	You don't want to, but I think I sent you a note after this. I sent you a voicemail. I was like, "Man, that story really moved me—about my own, you know, dad issues that are going on." The way you told it is funny, first of all, but secondly I think it's really powerful. There's a lot of people, I think, who have stuff like this but don't know personally. I would love to hear.
01:07:58	Hayes Barnard	"I don't."
01:07:58	Shaan Puri	If you're open to sharing.
01:07:59	Hayes Barnard	No, no—look. I'll totally share it. It's an interesting story. So, remember: my dad left me in Saint Louis, Missouri. My mom, my dad, and I had moved from Illinois to Missouri. He worked for Merit, so he was the kind of guy who would take people on incentive trips. He was a drinker and had a lot of problems with alcohol. I want to be respectful to my father and all of that, but long story short, he left and they separated.
01:08:29	Shaan Puri	At a young age, you're...
01:08:30	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, I was about two years old.
01:08:32	Shaan Puri	Okay.
01:08:32	Hayes Barnard	We didn't hear from him. As a kid, if you're a decent athlete or doing things, you really hope your dad calls and says, "Hey man, I saw that"—or you see an article and you want him to notice. You always think about who your father is and maybe what the situation was. My mom was amazing. She never said anything poor about my dad, so I didn't know much about him and it wasn't a focus. I became the man of the house at a pretty young age, which wasn't great for my mom because I would run her boyfriends off. I was trying to be a little alpha dog around the apartment, and I regret that. When I was at Oracle and I had, quote, "made it," I decided I wanted to find my father. I sat next to this guy Kelly Cook—he was a good old boy from Oklahoma. Kelly Cook played football at Oklahoma State; he was the fullback for Barry Sanders and Thurman Thomas. I called him Big Papa and he called me Playa. I said, "Big Papa, man, I want to find my dad." He said, "You know this internet thing—we can maybe find him on the internet." I asked, "You think we could find him on the internet?" He said, "Yeah man, let me see if I can figure it out." Not a day later, Kelly's on the phone waving me over. He's like, "I got your dad. I got your dad on the phone, man." I said, "What? You got my dad on the phone?" He hands me the phone and says, "Hey Jim... oh yeah, you're Jim, you're from Illinois, right? Oh, hey Jim, that's what I thought." I was thinking, what is going on—why is he talking to this guy about a suit, about the size and the sleeve length? But then Kelly goes, "Hey, you're not gonna believe it. I was working at Redwood Shores now at Oracle's HQ and your dad—your father is in Palo Alto and he works for Patrick James clothing shop." He found him through tax records. I thought, really? He sells clothing across from Stanford, right? It's maybe fifteen minutes down the road.
01:10:47	Shaan Puri	The road.
01:10:47	Hayes Barnard	Okay, and I'm like, "Kelly, come on, you gotta be kidding me." He goes, "No." Well, that rocked me for about three months. I'm like, my dad is fifteen minutes away from me—what are the odds both of us are out here in the Silicon Valley? I put my best suit on, went down there, took a big deep breath, and said, "All right, man, I'm gonna go meet my dad. I'm gonna go in there and make it happen." I was kind of looking in the store, like, is that him? Is that him? Excited to have any pictures or anything. I walked in and said, "Hey, how are you doing?" They said, "Great." I asked, "Is Jim Barnard here?" They said, "No, Jim doesn't work here on Wednesdays." He's here Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays—or something like that. I was like, oh man, okay. I think subconsciously I wanted a reason to come back. They asked, "How can I help you?" At the time I bought custom shirts because I have a 37-inch arm. I said, "I'll get a couple custom shirts," and they said, "Sure, no problem. What's your name?" I used my best friend's name—Jason Walker—from the fourth grade. I said, "I'm Jason Walker." They said, "Oh, hey Jason, how you doing?" Anyway, I bought the shirts. At the end the guy asked, "They're $150—how do you want to pay for it?" I said, "Oh man, well I can't use my credit card because it says Hayes Barnard." I said, "Hold on a second—I left my wallet in the car." I went to the ATM, got the money out—about $150—went back in and said, "Hey man, I just have cash; is this okay?" He said, "Yeah, Jason, you got a phone number? Cool, we'll call you." In those days it was like a month and a half before your shirts.
01:12:16	Shaan Puri	Are done.
01:12:16	Hayes Barnard	Okay, so I'm like, all right. Now you can imagine: a month and a half, I'm sitting there making my phone calls at Oracle, doing my whole thing, and I'm thinking, "Man, am I gonna meet my dad? Am I gonna meet my dad?" I put my best suit on. They call, they leave a voicemail: "Your shirts are ready." I go back. Well, this time I can see him. This time I'm like, "Oh man, that's definitely him." When you see your dad for the first time, you're like, "Okay, that's his face now." He's shorter than me, he's a little fuller than me, but that's his face. I'm like, "Oh boy, okay, this is it." He comes out and he's got a cigarette in his hand. It isn't lit yet and he's got the lighter in his hand. It's dusk—about 5:30 p.m. I drove down there after work. He goes back in the back alley and I'm like, "Well, he's in that back alley back there. If I'm ever gonna go back there, I don't want to embarrass him or anything. I'm gonna go there and meet him." My car is parked this way; he was kind of behind me, so I was looking in the rearview mirror. I get out of the car—I'm ready. You can imagine: I'm like 30 years old, I've made it, I'm making good money, I got my suit on, I want my father to be proud of me. Big moment. But I'm shaking, my heart's pumping. I go around the corner and he says, "Oh shit, you startled me." He's having his cigarette. I said, "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. I just came back here to introduce myself to you." He said, "Well, great. My name is Jim Barnard." I took a deep breath and said, "My name is Hayes Barnard." He had that cigarette in his hand—his hand started shaking—and he just looked at me and he just said, "Son." I said, "Yeah." He said, "I'm so sorry." I was like, "Man, don't be sorry at all." He buried his head in my chest. I wrapped my arms around him and I just held him—for like twenty minutes. He cried in my chest. My whole shirt was covered in his tears and snot and the whole thing. You can imagine—it's really powerful. In the moment I'm like, "He probably thought this guy came from Chicago, did he come from Missouri? What is this kid doing out here?" I kept saying, "Dad, it's okay. Don't be sorry. Don't be sorry. I just wanted to meet you." He kept saying, "I'm so sorry." I said, "Don't be sorry." Sorry—I'm getting a little emotional. We go inside. The guy I bought the shirts from—his name was Duane—he goes, "Hey Jason, right?" I said, "No, no, my name's Hayes." Duane said, "Hayes?" My father said, "Hey Duane." He'd worked for him for about fifteen years at Patrick James selling clothes there. My dad said, "This is my son. This is Hayes Barnard." Duane said, "Jim, I didn't know you had a son." My dad said, "Well yeah, I got a son, and this is him." That was it—I kind of met my dad there. He asked, "By any chance do you like football? I got 49ers tickets." I said, "Yeah, I do like football, Dad, and I'd love to go to a 49ers game with you." That was it. I learned a lot about my life after that, which was amazing. There are all these super interesting things I learned about my life when you meet your father when you're thirty years old.
01:15:51	Shaan Puri	The one thing that strikes me is that you weren't resentful or upset. I mean, that seems unusual to me.
01:15:59	Hayes Barnard	Well, I realized in time that probably the best thing that ever happened to me was not having a father. I know it sounds terrible now, but when I was a young boy I was angry—why don't I have a dad? Why do we live like this? All those kinds of things. As an older man, you realize that having a mother in that situation—and the drive and the responsibility that she gave you—was probably one of the greatest gifts that ever happened in my life. I was there more probably because I was looking for affirmation from him. I wanted him to be proud. I wanted him to see how hard I had worked and the things that I had done, and to have a level of respect for me. For some reason it was just important to have that affirmation from my dad. So I got that closure. I didn't get a lot of time with him—he ended up passing away—but he definitely had an opportunity to get to know me, to get to know my kids, to get to know my wife, to see some of the things that I had done. We expressed a lot of love and respect for each other. For me, it's like sometimes that's your opportunity to show a tremendous amount of compassion and empathy for someone. He did the best he could. He had addiction issues, he had some challenges, and he had his own issues with self-confidence. His father passed away really young; his father was a severe alcoholic, and his grandfather was a severe alcoholic. He was adopted by a man named Hayden Barnard, a renowned doctor in Hinsdale, Illinois, when he was 12 years old. My father's real name was James Neil O'Brien, but at 12 years old they changed his name to Jim Barnard. That's why he named me Hayden Barnard—because the man who adopted him was named Hayden Barnard.
01:17:48	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I appreciate you telling that story.
01:17:52	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, you're welcome, man. It's good — thanks for asking. I've never told that one before, definitely on camera.
01:17:57	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things you try to do is... what did you say your life mission is? To connect the hearts of people all around the world — for good, or...?"
01:18:07	Hayes Barnard	"For positive—yeah. Connect the hearts of others. Create positive change in the world."
01:18:10	Shaan Puri	"How do you do that without sharing your own stories and your own vulnerabilities, right?"
01:18:14	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of people out there who probably didn't have a father or had challenges with their father in some way, shape, or form. Honestly, it's a valley for a lot of people when they're young, but it's probably a spike for people later in their life, right?
01:18:30	Shaan Puri	Yeah. You told me about the "lay in the dirt" story. I love this story. What's that story?
01:18:35	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, look... that was a very, very difficult time for me and I was really, really hurting. I had this idea. I'd heard a friend of mine, Brad Tewksbury, went to this organization—at the time it was called Building with Books (now called BuildOn). He had gone to Africa and built a school. He came back and Tewks was like, "Look, you should do this, man. You'd find a lot of meaning in this." I had been in a victim mindset—the "woe is me" thing: "Oh man, I had to lay off these people. Oh man, I'm really hurting right now. I'm in this tough spot." I went to my executive team and I said, "Look, crazy idea: what if we all go to Africa and we build a school?" They were like, "What? Man, we're struggling right now—we just laid off 400 people. Why in the world would we go to Africa and build a school with some organization called BuildOn?" I said, "I don't know—Tewks went, he said it was amazing. I think we should raise some money from our friends and go lay in the dirt and get grounded." It just called me. Long story short, everybody was like, "We're in. Let's go make it happen." We raised a little money and flew over to Bamako, in west Mali, Africa. We loaded up this van with a goat on top—literally. We strapped a goat to the top of this van, we all got our backpacks, and we drove 16 hours out to the Zaremburu tribe. "Wait—why'd you need..."
01:20:00	Shaan Puri	A goat on the van. Well, I...
01:20:02	Hayes Barnard	I didn't know. I had no idea because the handlers there don't ask too many questions. A goat? I'm like, "We gotta bring a goat—I've never been in Africa." Good gift. This is interesting. We get there, we meet the chief, we have the translators, they're doing the whole thing. We learn, then we slit the goat's throat. In this part of the world, you drink the blood of the goat—that's the ceremonial thing—and you're welcomed into the village. It's a big deal. They cook the goat because most of the time they just eat this grain, millet, basically, every single day. I was in the dirt in this woman's hut. They just welcome you: you dance in the village every night, you sing. These people are so happy and alive. It's sad they often die by the time they're 30 years old because of poisons and other issues, but they're very, very happy people. My brother-in-law and I were laying in the dirt in this tent. Everyone else had their own little mud huts. All the camel spiders were around. You go to the bathroom in this little hole, and when you open it up there are camel spiders in there as well. With headlamps on, your whole nervous system is being shaken up. About every morning at 2:30 a.m. you could hear Awa—she's shaking that grain. You're thinking, "She's shaking that grain for me." You hear it and you think, "Wow—she's up there at 2:30 in the morning shaking grain for me." Then you hear hacking, like she's hacking wood, and she's lighting the fire. You're like, "What? She's lighting a fire for me at three in the morning?" Every morning for seven nights you're thinking about this. Then one morning I come out and the bucket of water is over the fire so I could bathe in the morning with warm water. I asked her, "Do you get the water?" She said, "Oh, let me take you." I thought she was going to take me around the corner, but we're gone for five hours. We walk literally like five miles to a river where all the livestock live. She puts the water on her head and then walks back another four or five miles. She does this every single day—for my bucket of water—so I could bathe in the morning and at night before I go to bed. The guilt was intense. On the fifth night, lying there, I had an epiphany: we're building the school, but it's almost all boys in the school. Where are the girls? The girls are fetching water and filling buckets instead of filling their brains in the classroom. I thought, "There's gotta be a way to figure this out." At the time I was diversifying into the solar business. I thought, what if I could put solar on all these schools and get Intel and other players to donate laptops? We could extend the hours in the classroom so women and kids can get educated. I had this lightning-rod moment—these big downloads at certain times in my life—like, okay, I need to start a foundation that's going to find a way to light up all these schools. That was the moment. That's how I came up with it.
01:23:31	Shaan Puri	Wow, yeah. So you go back and you kind of had a model that was like the TOMS model, right? "Would we sell solar here in the U.S., then we can give solar in Africa—yeah, on the schools," right? That was the sort of the blueprint.
01:23:46	Hayes Barnard	Well, let me explain how it went down. The solar company took off quickly. We became the second-largest solar company—maybe the third. There was Sunrun, there was SolarCity, and us. These were kind of the three players in residential solar in the United States. I was partnered with Sunrun, and I was partnered with SolarCity.
01:24:03	Shaan Puri	Like, you would sell it; they would install it, right?
01:24:05	Hayes Barnard	"That's right — you nailed it. We were good at financing as well, so we started to launch our own tax equity funds and our own financing funds. This was a new way where we could, basically, use structured finance solutions to offer zero-down financing for people to electrify their homes — to put solar on their homes."
01:24:25	Shaan Puri	"I think there's a good story. I don't know what the story is, but they told me it's a good story about how you struck the deal with SolarCity."
01:24:33	Hayes Barnard	Well, so... we're doing about 40% of SolarCity's business at the time, less in Sunrun. But both companies — the woman that founded Sunrun, her name's Lynn Jurich; she's an amazing woman — and Lyndon Rive, who was the CEO of SolarCity and who's Elon's cousin, I had a great relationship with both of them. They both came and said, "Look, we'd love to buy you. We'd love to roll you in. We'd love to make you a part of the organization and what we're doing." So we had a lot of discussions, and I was like, "Well, do you want the insurance company? Do you want the mortgage company?" Like, "No, you can keep your other two sad companies — I'm joking — but we want you and we want the solar business." After some thought, Lynn and I had become really close personal friends. Our families were vacationing together; our kids were really close friends; our wives were really close friends. Lyndon's brother Pete — I also became very close with him and his wife and his kids — so we were becoming a family. They said, "Hey, come on man, we're going to IPO this company and we really need you to be a part of it, or we'll IPO it and then we'll buy you a week or two later." So I said, "Hey, I'm open to it. Let's think about it." We had met with Elon, had discussions with him, and talked about how we could build the biggest solar company in the history of the world — what this could look like and all the things we could do. I was going to build a solar system down in Nicaragua for a school, and I said, "Look, would you come with me? Would you come with me to see us put solar on a school in Nicaragua and the impact we can make?" I had this big vision for putting solar on all these schools. Lyndon was awesome; he goes, "I'm in — let's go make it happen." So we went down to Nicaragua. We built a solar system for the school. Lyndon and I sat on the roof; he's like, "This is unbelievable, man. This is a really, really cool thing to do." I said, "What if for every megawatt of energy we deploy here in the United States, we put solar on a school somewhere in the world?" He was like, "I love it, man — let's make it happen. Let's do it through a 501(c)(3) nonprofit." So in three years, we put solar on about 2,500 schools in several countries in the world. That's amazing.
01:26:45	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, you're doing some amazing things right now with your philanthropy around water. But your organization, GivePower — you just talked about how you're doing solar panels on schools. So where did the shift go from solar panels to water? Three years later... I"
01:26:59	Hayes Barnard	I went back to all these places in the world — whether it was Nepal or Nicaragua or different parts of Africa and Kenya — and I realized that we had lit up all these schools. When you walk into the schools, this made me sad: it was a bunch of guys with their cell phones plugged in or people playing video games on laptops. I thought, great — I brought video games to the developing world. I gave these guys cell phones because they didn't have cell phones the first time I was there. The first time they saw my cell phone, you could take a picture of them and they were like, “whoa, that's me.” They'd never seen themselves in a mirror. These people are amazing — they brush their teeth with a stick — and now all of a sudden I brought cell phones to this area because we brought power to the area. I was like, this wasn't a great idea. It hit me hard that the women weren't sitting in the classroom until 7:00 at night. They were exhausted — they were still going and fetching water for, you know, five hours a day. Awa was still doing her thing and her daughters weren't in the classroom. I was like, wow. We'd done whatever it was at the time — 2,500–2,600 schools — and yes, it was great: we brought electricity to schools and the schools had light. But it didn't accomplish the mission I wanted. What I realized was we needed to invent a magic water box. We had to find a way to bring water into the village so the women could be in the classroom, not fetching water, and so the water would be healthy and affordable. How could we do that? By that time I really had this solar thing under my belt, and we were starting to do these things called microgrids. Sometimes wealthy people would call us and say, “Could you do a microgrid on my island?” I would say, “Well, I don't know — maybe.” Our engineers were brilliant; they could figure it out. I thought, if we can build microgrids for people on islands off-grid with this new battery storage we had invented and solar, this is kind of interesting — what if we could bring it to the developing world? At the same time, a friend of mine in my neighborhood in Tiburon had invented a water pump for yachts. He wanted to travel around the world on his yacht and have that pump pull water out of the ocean so he could drink healthy water all day without having to stop. I said, “How'd you do it?” He said, “I did it with a solar panel.” I thought, oh wow, that's super interesting. I found this guy — his name is Kyle Stefan, president of a company called Spectra Watermakers — and we went to him and said, “Look, crazy idea: could we marry your genius with these pumps with these amazing engineers that we have at SolarCity and Tesla, who really understand battery storage and solar? Can we marry that together to produce healthy, affordable, fresh water out of a brackish well or out of the ocean, utilizing reverse osmosis and desalination?” They said, “Can't be done. It's too grid intensive. It's too expensive. Good luck — you're naive. You have no idea. You're not a good enough engineer to understand that this is impossible. It's too expensive,” and so on. Well, look — I am naive. I wanted to try. So we spent about a year, maybe a year and a half, trying to build that system. We couldn't get it to work at first, and then finally we cracked the code. I thought, let's put it in a container so we can ship it anywhere in the world. We will drop these things all over the world and produce healthy, affordable, sustainable water for people off-grid in the communities where we've done these schools. That was the breakthrough. The insight was that we could almost turn this into an economic model — like the milkman model in the 1960s — where we changed the model so women could actually make money and earn a living by distributing this water.
01:30:53	Shaan Puri	People don't understand, like, after it's clean, basically.
01:30:56	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, absolutely.</FormattedResponse>
01:30:57	Shaan Puri	Instead of carrying the dirty water back, take the clean water and become distributors for this. I can, right?
01:31:02	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of people who have these causes — they say we need to address migration issues, socioeconomic issues, women's rights, education, health care. What I realized, the breakthrough epiphany I had, was: you can't address migration issues until you address the water issue. When Greg Brennaman — who is on the board of Home Depot, an amazing CEO and incredible philanthropist — and I went to Honduras, we flew around together to all these locations that had migration problems and water scarcity. He had the same breakthrough with me: we had to solve the water issue, otherwise people are going to move. I said to him, "Greg, look at me. You and I are pretty capable guys. Imagine you and I grew up here, we live here — are we going to leave if we're drinking poison every day and everyone's dying by the time they're 30?" He said, "We're going to leave." I said, "Exactly." Water is the unlock. Water is the foundation and fundamental thing that now allows you to say, "Okay, now we can educate the women," because they have the time — they're not fetching water all day long. Now we can change the socioeconomic model where people can sell and distribute the water within the communities — like milkmen and [unclear: "enlighten"] in the 1960s, their tuk-tuks, and all these other cool contraptions they built to distribute this water. Now we can talk about health care issues, because people are drinking fresh, affordable water and they can stay alive. But you can't stay alive if you drink poison. That's why I'm really passionate about it — it checks a lot of boxes for me.
01:32:42	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's amazing. I went to Africa — I went to Ethiopia with charity: water. It was... because even when you hear people say, "they have to walk to get water," "walk" is the wrong word. It's basically scorching hot. You're in a desert, you're walking, and then you're carrying — it's like a farmer's carry. Imagine carrying 45-pound dumbbells on both sides and walking for four hours.
01:33:11	Hayes Barnard	Right.
01:33:12	Shaan Puri	So, they had us do, like, the carry of...
01:33:14	Hayes Barnard	"It's heavy, isn't it?"
01:33:15	Shaan Puri	Oh my. You got us—one man does steps, and I'm like, "Yeah, I work out five times a week," you know. And this woman would just throw it up on her head and walk for four hours. I was...
01:33:24	Hayes Barnard	In, yeah.
01:33:25	Shaan Puri	I mean... it's like the ultimate sales pitch. It's like, if you could just get everyone in the world to try that walk one time, everybody would be like, "Yeah, we gotta solve this problem."
01:33:34	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, no. Charity: Water is a phenomenal organization—Water.org, like, all these people are trying to solve the problem in different ways. Ours is: there are 2 billion people in the world that lack access to electricity. They're the same 2 billion people in the world that lack access to sustainable water and that have water scarcity issues. This is not about just water filtration or distributing water. This is about dignity. This is about hope. This is about opportunity for humanity in these areas and capable people like you. I'm telling you, Sean, if you laid in the dirt with me... I just got back from a trip recently. I was over in Kenya. I did a trek over there with 20 UT students, and then I went to Mombasa. I got in the bowser and I delivered water, and I passed the 30‑liter jugs of water to the guys. You just realize, like, I'm alive when I'm there. I can see I'm not in the vitamin business when I'm there—I'm in the lifesaving business when I'm there. Every drop of water that we distribute, we, you know, we save lives. And we've got the unit economics—as you know, it all comes down to math, right? We've got the unit economics down to $0.01 a day, $0.01 a day for someone. And so...</FormattedResponse>
01:34:50	Shaan Puri	"A penny a day." Explain that more. "A penny?" </FormattedResponse>
01:34:52	Hayes Barnard	For 1¢, you can provide healthy, affordable drinking water for one person for one day. "It's a penny a day, man." We maintain these systems. Basically, we sell the water in the areas for half a cent. That allows us to take care of all the operations and maintenance. It allows us to pay for all the people that work in the area—the people who work on the system for us and maintain the system. So it's got real teeth to it. I mean, this thing is a real economic model that scales. I'm really happy with the team. It's an extraordinary group of people who have really thought through: okay, now how do we scale that? How do we deploy as many of those systems as we possibly can all throughout the world for these people as fast as we can? People ask, "What happens with the salt that goes back?" These systems produce about 75,000 liters of water every single day. One system produces 75,000 liters of water every single day, and we design them at a scale in which it's a very small amount of salt that goes back into the ocean. We've also invented other systems where we can pull water right out of a brackish well. The little hidden secret that most people don't know is that a lot of these boreholes that are drilled go brackish and then sit there, and no one does anything with them. We can take our systems, drop our lines in there, desalinate that water utilizing reverse osmosis, and deliver that healthy water to these communities as well. Water is life. It's pretty cool.
01:36:21	Shaan Puri	"So, if somebody's inspired, what's the right way to get involved or give? What's the call to action?" </FormattedResponse>
01:36:27	Hayes Barnard	"Yeah, look. I mean, you can go to the GivePower website—it's givepower.org—and you can see ways in which you can give and those kinds of things. We're trying to come up with all different types of ways for people to participate. We sent about 1,300 people on treks over the last few years. I want them to see it. I want them to realize: you shouldn't have to sacrifice your entire life just so you can have a glass of water. When you roll your sleeves up, get your hands dirty, and build one of these systems, you see how technology can transform communities overnight—not over a year, but instantaneous. The moment the water comes on, everybody's alive; they're celebrating, dancing, and singing. All of a sudden, the kids are healthier, everyone's vibrant, and it just creates a tremendous amount of optimism, hope, and opportunity."
01:37:20	Shaan Puri	"That's amazing. Hey — thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it."
01:37:24	Hayes Barnard	Yeah, thank you too, man.

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The $4B Man: How to win BIG in business

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